Controversial Bridgewater lodging house license back before Council

The Bridgewater Town Council postponed a decision on a lodging house license application for 28 School St. in the wake of a judge’s order to take another look at a previous denial.“It seems we’re between a rock and a hard place,” Councilor Bill Rivers said at the Sept. 17 Council meeting....

The Bridgewater Town Council postponed a decision on a lodging house license application for 28 School St. in the wake of a judge’s order to take another look at a previous denial.

“It seems we’re between a rock and a hard place,” Councilor Bill Rivers said at the Sept. 17 Council meeting.

“If we turn it down, I’m worried we’d be before the same judge who’ll just overturn us,” said Rivers, who motioned to approve an application by Gail Buie-Yelle for a lodging house license at the School Street property, which has been the subject of years of legal wrangling with the town.

The Council voted unanimously to postpone the decision on whether to grant the license until the board’s next meeting, on Oct. 1.

The house is currently designated a two-family residence, which means it may have up to six unrelated tenants, three in each unit. The lodging house license would allow Buie-Yelle to house up to 20 tenants.

In October, 2010, prior to the change to a council-manager form of government, selectmen rejected an application from Buie-Yelle’s husband, Kenneth Yelle, for a trio of lodging house licenses. The other two were for off-campus student housing and the School Street location was to be a “sober house.”

In their denial letter, selectmen declared the buildings “not safe, sanitary or suitable for human habitation” and the landlord “not qualified to operate a lodging house.”

Yelle appealed and the parties entered into a settlement agreement, whereby Yelle agreed to limit the number of tenants to six with the understanding Buie-Yelle was authorized to submit a new application for the license in her name.

In September of 2011, she did just that.

But after a series of public hearing, the Town Council denied the application in January, 2012, on the recommendation of the police and fire chiefs and the building inspector, while the Board of Health, the plumbing inspector and the wiring inspector said their previous concerns about the condition of the property had been addressed, town attorney Marc Gildea said.

Buie-Yelle appealed to the housing court and in December, 2012, the court issued a ruling remanding the case back to the town for further consideration.

The court found the town’s denial of the lodging house license was “unsupported by substantial evidence, unwarranted by the facts and a decision that was arbitrary and capricious.”’

The judge pointed out that the town had agreed to “work cooperatively to support the processing and approval of the application” as part of the previous settlement agreement — though both parties acknowledged “ultimate approval” was subject to a vote of the licensing authority — the Town Council.

The town asked the court for “clarification” as to whether the Council may hold a new hearing, but the judge said the Council must consider the application based on the record as it stands, Gildea said.

Page 2 of 3 - “It’s not a new hearing. It’s not an opportunity for either side to present any new information,” Gildea told councilors last week.

Rivers, who was not yet a member of the Council when the initial denial was issued, said the court ruling seemed to leave the Council with few options.

“From my reading of the court documents, the judge put this back to the Council because he didn’t see a good enough reason to reject, but we can’t hear new evidence. Do we really have the choice to deny?” Rivers asked.

But Councilor Scott Pitta, who was a member of the Council at the time the original denial was issued, said he thinks the Council made the right call the first time around.

“We have recommendations from our public safety officials against this. The record isn’t enough for me to change my vote,” Pitta said.

Police Chief Christopher Delmonte said after the hearing he still recommends against approval.

In a Jan. 12, 2012 letter to the then-Town Manager Troy Clarkson, Delmonte wrote: “I am concerned about how this property has been managed in the past, how it is being managed now and how it will be managed in the future. Buie-Yelle is a different applicant in name only and has been involved in the operations of this property to varying degrees for several years.”

In the 2012 letter, Delmonte said police and fire had responded to more than 200 calls at 28 School St. between 2007 and 2010. That is a very high number based on the number of tenants, he said.

“I don’t think granting this lodging house license is in the best interest of the community,” Delmonte said.

Delmonte wrote in the letter that as of that date, with just six tenants in the building, police and fire had responded to six incidents in the previous five months, including a domestic disturbance, a medical emergency involving an intoxicated person, twice for service of arrest warrants and once for an illegal fire.

That’s a disproportionate number, he said. It’s about the same rate as existing lodging houses in town with many more tenants, he said.

But Buie-Yelle’s attorney Timothy White of White and White of Weymouth said the 200 calls were from and era when the location was used as a “sober house” for recovering addicts and are no indication of what can be expected from the building as a lodging house for college students, the current proposed use.

As to the six calls, White said one was for a man who’d locked his keys in his car; two were for warrants that had nothing to do with activities that took place at the lodging house; and the fire call had to do with a temporary heating unit due to a malfunction in the permanent one. He said the town’s licensed lodging houses had more calls, and of a more serious nature, in a comparable period.

Page 3 of 3 - “With all due respect to the chief, I think he’s wrong on this one and I think that’s what the judge found,” White said.